Casting Life, Recasting Experience: Bernard Palissy's Occupation between Maker and Nature

          this is an art
Which does mend nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is nature.

William Shakespeare¹

I shall make him a model whereby he will be able to understand.

Bernard Palissy²

The sixteenth-century natural historian and ceramicist Bernard Palissy took life into his own hands, channeling nature into clay. Best known today for his rustic-style ceramic plates (rustiques figulines), he has been celebrated as a geological theorizer, author, and religious martyr. Above all else, however, Palissy (1510-1590) was a craftsman—a polymath potter of forms, words, and natural knowledge. His labors and his legacy as an artisan of novel ceramic basins—simultaneously

Figure 1.

Life-size bronze statue of Bernard Palissy. Palissy, holding a rustic platter, has fossilized seashells, crystals, and a kiln at his feet, and wears a potter's apron over a gentleman's dress. From Phillippe Burty, Les artistes célèbres: Bernard Palissy (Paris: Librairie de l'Art, 1886), p. 13.

artworks, natural formations, and teaching tools—helped usher in a new material culture of knowledge production (Fig. 1).

Palissy's career reveals a Renaissance maker embodying intellectual curiosity, artisanal skill, and spiritual fervor.³ From his first to his last experiments in life and clay, he seems to have worked with simultaneous passions of hand and mind. Over a life that spanned the sixteenth century, Palissy had a productive—and tumultuous—career as a ceramicist, geologist, and public lecturer, rising from humble origins to wealth and fame. Born around 1510 into an artisanal family in southwestern France, he first trained as a draughtsman and glass-painter, receiving a few years of vernacular education. In his teens and twenties, he worked as an itinerant painter, land-surveyor, and mapmaker, pursuing natural history and geology in the field. By about 1540, he settled down near Bordeaux, where he began to experiment with ceramic practice. Palissy's labors brought forth grottoes and fountains as well as his popular rustic basins, the sculpted ponds encrusted with animals and gilded by glazes that are the subject of this essay (Fig. 2).⁴

Over the centuries since Palissy's death at the Bastille in 1590, a substantial and diverse historiography has developed around his life and work. On the one hand, geologists and historians have examined his writings in the context of the history of paleontology and the agricultural

Figure 2.

Typical rustic basin by Bernard Palissy, from Phillippe Burty, Les artistes celèbres: Bernard Palissy (Paris: Librairie de l'Art, 1886), p. 49.

sciences.⁵ On the other hand, art historians and connoisseurs have studied his collectible ceramic plates, focusing largely on aesthetic, technical, and provenance issues.⁶ These two, largely separate, clusters of scholarship have accomplished a great deal, providing a sense of Palissy's contributions to both the earth sciences and the decorative arts as traditionally understood. My analysis builds on such valuable previous work. I place both these methodological approaches and their ceramic objects of inquiry in the context of the recent flowering of interest in the roles of material, artisanal, and craft cultures in the development of early modern science and natural philosophy.⁷

In this article, I examine Palissy's rustic ceramics—vessels fused with multicolored glazed statuary cast from shells, plants, and live amphibian and marine specimens—in light of both their own production and that of the Discours admirables, Palissy's 1580 treatise on agriculture and geology. Fusing textual and material analysis, I consider Palissy's ceramic ware through the lens of his writings on geology and agriculture. Drawing from Palissy's own words and narratives, I read his plates as expressive embodiments—both heuristic and illustrative—of his innovative, and sometimes controversial, theories about natural history. I interpret their visual and material contours in relation to his ideas about three phenomena: generation, fossilization, and coloration in nature. Through this interpretive framework, clay thereby emerges as a vital new medium...